RELATED: 10 Things Your Skin Is Trying to Tell You - and How to Respond “The hyaluronic acid helps in the anti-aging process as it hydrates the skin, and antimicrobial peptides have been known to help reduce acne and treat hyperpigmentation,” says Cho, whose New York City brick-and-mortar pop up, Soko House, opened recently to legions of snail slime devotees lining up around the block to snag the stuff in real life. What’s the mix in snail trails that makes it a veritable fountain of youth? “Snail mucin is packed with nutrients such as hyaluronic acid, glycoprotein enzymes, antimicrobial and copper peptides, and proteoglycans,” says the New York City–based aesthetician Charlotte Cho, the cofounder of the K-beauty blog Soko Glam.
Snail farming in Italy has increased 325 percent in the last two decades, largely due to cosmetic demands, the Guardian reported in February 2017. K-beauty brands like Cosrx, Missha, and Mizon sell wildly popular sheet masks, creams, and bottles of straight-up slime that tout miraculous benefits, from smoothing fine lines and wrinkles to reducing the appearance of acne scarring and hyperpigmentation to giving you that supple, dewy glow that has become the bar for skin-care influencers, coveted by every beauty fan with a pulse. Apparently, the gross factor hasn’t kept beauty lovers at bay. For the uninitiated: Yes, snail mucin is the actual mucus snails secrete to protect themselves from cuts and scrapes as they slither through the world. In the early 2000s snail mucin, also known as snail oil, snail serum, snail filtrate, snail slime, or just “the slime,” began popping up in Korean beauty products, and as that market began to expand globally, it started picking up a following in the West. Today's skin-care companies are hot on the trail. “Historically many societies, especially ancient ones and more recently France, have used live snails as anti-aging 'devices,” says Gregory Bays Brown, MD, a plastic surgeon in New York City and the founder of the RéVive skin-care line. As with the eureka moment described by Chatelaine in 2016 regarding red grapes and anti-aging at French vineyards, the seeds of a beauty trend were planted. The idea was reborn in the ’80s, the Associated Pressreported, when workers on a Chilean snail farm began observing their hands were softer and plumper hands after handling the gooey creatures. in ancient Greece, Hippocrates reportedly prescribed crushed snail shells in an ointment to treat inflammation, notes a paper published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. I’ll put escargots in my face any chance I get, so as a woman of the world, why on earth haven’t I smeared their slime on my face yet?Īfter all, incorporating snails in skin care is nothing new. The same stuff that’s been a K-beauty skin-care staple for several years and has now even made its way to the big-box stores. You know, the stuff the snails leave a trail of in their wake. When I think of snails, the first things that come to mind are garlic herb butter, baguettes, and Chardonnay, and the next is the slime.